Payday loan company Wonga have warned its customers that almost 250,000 of them could be at risk of having their personal data stolen after a data breach.

Wonga started to get in touch with affected customers on Saturday to make them aware of the problem, giving details of a dedicated customer services team.

The message said: "We believe there may have been illegal and unauthorised access to some of your personal data on your Wonga.com account."

According to the message, the data breach "may have included one or more of the following: name, email address, home address, phone number, the last four digits of your card number (but not the whole number) and/or your bank account number and sort code."

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Wonga does not believe that accounts and passwords were accessed, but it has warned customers to look out for any unusual activity across their accounts.

This isn't the first time that Wonga has been dragged into controversy. The lender, which advertises heavily through football sponsorships and on TV, offers pay day loans at a high rate of interest, starting at 1,286% a year.

In 2014, Wonga was made to write off the debts of 330,000 customers after it admitted to granting loans to people who could not afford to repay them, and to chasing debts through a made up law firm.

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Wonga is not the only big name company to have suffered a large data breach in recent times.

In November, Tesco suffered a breach with £2.5 million stolen from 9,000 customers, while mobile network providers Three saw 130,000 of its customers details compromised after it too came under attack.